TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Foreword, by G. Fele and V. D’Andrea p. 6

2. Heidegger’s Notion of Befindlichkeit and the Meaning of

“Situated” in Social Inquiries, by K. Liberman p. 8

2.1 What is the big deal about ‘in situ’ studies? p. 10

2.2 The Problem with Over-conceptualizing, and the Limits of
‘Conoscenza Teoretica’ p. 13
2.3 Befindlichkeit p. 17
2.4 The Limits of Formal Analysis p. 17
2.5 Conclusion p. 19

3. Afterword, by G. M. Campagnolo, Y. Curzi and G. Viscusi p. 21

3.1 From formal representations to subjective objectivity p. 21

3.2 Research and intervention upon social and organizational

systems: what strategy of study? p. 28

3.3 . The historical evolution and the geographical expansion of

the practice of producing information systems for
organizations p.34
 1.
Foreword

by
Giolo Fele* and Vincenzo D’Andrea†

This publication is based on the presentation that Ken Liberman gave

to the Alpis Sky seminar in 2009. Liberman, who teaches sociology at the
University of Oregon and was Fulbright Senior Specialist at the Faculty
of Sociology, University of Trento in 2009, discusses on the topic of
situated knowledge, a growing concern in the field of information
systems. Liberman adopts a phenomenological perspective, with a strong
ethnomethodological orientation. A student of Peter Berger and Herbert
Marcuse, but especially of Harold Garfinkel (2002) and Hubert Dreyfus
(1990), Liberman discusses and presents his argument starting from an
examination of Section 29 of the fundamental text of Heidegger’s Being
and Time. Essentially, this very complex text deals with the question of
the adequacy of our modes of representation of social forms and with
the ways in which these forms are experienced in our daily lives. It is well
known that technological solutions create patterns and structures of
social organization which impose life forms completely outside of our
experience with which we must come to terms, often with difficulty. As
we know much of the engineering culture which is at the base of these
technological solutions is not oriented towards a social or sociological
perspective. Recently, however, we have seen a growing interest in the
social contexts of technological innovations (for a reconstruction see
Fele 2009). This shift of attention by the specialists in business sciences,
management, and information systems, has led to a deepening of social
approaches into the constitutive mechanisms and the fundamental forms
of social life (cfr. Dourish 2001; De Michelis 2008). Here we see the

*Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Trento.

†Faculty of Sociology and Engineering and Information Science Department,
University of Trento.

6
important role, on the theoretical level, of phenomenology and
ethnomethodology, and on the methodological level, of ethnography, in
identifying, recognizing and describing the most profound and most
subtle aspects of our social life (see Fele 2008). Heidegger's philosophy
provides the ideas for a non-trivial reflection on the foundations of
situated understanding (Dreyfus 1995, Winograd 1995, Ciborra 2004).
The issue of situated knowledge covered by Liberman’s essay goes far
beyond the usual (although by no means obvious) importance attributed
to context in the processes of communication. See the following passage
from Winograd & Flores (1985): "The computer, like any other medium,
must be understood in the context of communication and the larger
network of equipment and practice in which it is situated. A person who
sits down at a word processor is not just creating a document, but is
writing a letter or a memo or a book. There is a complex social network
in which these activities make sense. It includes institutions (such as post
offices and publishing companies), equipment (including word
processors and computer networks, but also all of the older technologies
with which they may coexist), practices (such as buying books and
reading the daily mail), and conventions (such as the legal status of
written documents)"(pp. 5-6). Winograd and Flores seminal perspective
recognizes the role and value of the network of relations within which
social action acquires meaning. Liberman’s contribution invites us to
look further and deeper. From an ethnomethodological perspective
(Garfinkel 2002), Liberman invites us to explore the depths of our
ordinary social world, the primitive place of our experience. As an
anthropologist who spent two years with some Australian Aboriginal
tribes [Liberman 1985] and three years in a Tibetan monastery [Liberman
2004]), he encourages us to reflect on that world taken for granted that
we call reality. Similarly, as philosopher (Liberman 2007), he sees the
limits of reason and the difficulties we fall into when we
overconceptualize our worldly relations, when we entrust entirely to
what he calls "the formal analysis", when we don’t recognize the very
carnal, practical and experiential character of social life. Starting from
this basis, the paper offers grounds for reflection on the field of
information systems. In the second part of this publication, Gianluigi
Viscusi, Ylenia Curzi and Gian Marco Campagnolo discuss the role of
formal representations in information systems, action-research
framework and fieldwork, and the possibility of research which
addresses post-local concerns.

7
 2.
Heidegger’s Notion of Befindlichkeit and the Meaning of “Situated” in Social
Inquiries

by
Kenneth Liberman‡

Four months ago Gian Marco Campagnolo sent me an email inviting

me to speak about phenomenology to the group here, and I emailed to
Gian Marco, “Yes, I know a good deal about phenomenology, but I
know nothing about Information Systems: how can I learn what would
be relevant to say to them? I said I was interested because I had a long
friendship with the chair of our Computer Science Department and also
I had three colleagues that are ethnomethologists - Lucy Suchman, Jack
Whalen and Marilyn Whalen – and who have done interesting research
for Xerox about how people actually use Xerox machines. I am aware of
their work and I am also aware that I should know more.
I have, however, been spending most of the last twelve years studying
the practices of reasoning of Tibetan monks, including spending three
years in a Buddist monasteries, so I am not very up to date on what
information systems research has been accomplishing, so I asked Gian
Marco again, “How can my participation be useful?” and he replied that
there is a group very interested in phenomenology. He sent me an article
by Claudia Ciborra to introduce me to the interest of ALPIS in
phenomenology, and so I said yes. It was then that he informed me that
I was to speak the first night. I rejected that idea, saying that if someone
does not know what the people are thinking, you want him to speak late
in the program. I added that I was certain there would be something of

‡ Oregon University

8
relevance I could say after listening to all of the papers, but it was an
unreasonable expectation for the first night.
Then I began reading Ciborra’s article, “Getting to the Heart of the
Situation: the Phenomenological Roots of Situatedness,” and I ran across
this passage from pages 5-6:

“References to phenomenology are often made, but never quite fully

explored and exploited. Collateral aspects are mentioned, such
transparency, ready-to-handedness and so on. Yet nobody quotes
Section 29 of Being and Time, where Heidegger (1962, pp. 172 – 182)
introduces the notion of situatedness (Befinlichkeit), contrasting it with the
privileged role attributed then (and now) to understanding, cognition and
the purely mental. … Lack of proper references to phenomenology while
using its ascendance may also induce the reader not versed in philosophy
to believe that what these authors say about situatedness is indeed all that
phenomenology has had to say on the subject.”

So I considered, if they want to know more about phenomenology

and one of their founding thinkers has recommended reading Section 29
of Heidegger’s Being and Time, then instead of offering more talk about
phenomenology, our meeting could be an occasion for reading some
phenomenology. And I could think of no better selection from
Heidegger than the Section 29 cited by Ciborra.
Ciborra’s paper “Getting to the Heart of the Situation,” could be re-
titled, “How did Befindlichkeit come to be ‘Situated’, and what has it lost
along the way?” Ciborra complains about what the Americans, like
Suchman, do with Heidegger when they undertake “situated studies”. I
have some sympathy with Ciborra’s lament here. As a social
phenomenologist I can say that I have spent much of the past four
decades wincing whenever I heard or read sociologists, anthropologists,
linguists, etc. use the term “phenomenological”. During this time, the
thin, shallow use of the term “phenomenology” is probably the principal
reason I have rejected the manuscripts that I review for various journals
and publishers.
So, let us examine Heidegger section on “Being as Attunement”. My
discussion is divided into four parts: (2.1) What is the big deal about in
situ studies?; (2.2) The Problem with Over-conceptualizing, and the
Limits of Conoscenza Teoretica; (2.3). Befindlichkeit; (2.4)The Limits of
Formal Analysis.

9
 2.1 What is the big deal about in situ studies?

How can something so subjective have had so much influence? For

the significant reason that the way that most of our models represent the
world is deeply flawed. This includes not only our models as analysts but
also the lay models that ordinary people and professionals alike employ
in their everyday life.
Our lives are lived subjectively. And our models do not account for
the way we actually live our lives. They idealize matters, and the real
work is made invisible; worse, the real work is obscured by the
aggressive employment of our most cogent models. Worse still, the more
cogent the models are made, the more obscuring they do. The actual
social medium of our ordinary work of organizing local situations is
rarely visible to the analyst, or to the practitioners, in just the way that water
is unnoticed by the fish who swim in a stream. One of the reasons is that
the influence of the Enlightenment survives today in the form of a
compulsion to make things out to be more definite and certain than they
really are. And here even the realists are lost within an idealism.
There is no fact, no “objective” that is not accompanied by an
interpretation; therefore, there can only exists a subjective objective.
There is objectivity, but it is always an interpreted objectivity. I ask my
students sometimes, “What is the difference between a fact and an
interpretation?” They have all these pop theories that they offer me, but
by the end I manage to convince them that most facts are
interpretations. We have a great need for objectivity, not only for
pursuing reliable knowledge but also for making it possible to
communicate with each other; but the objectivity we need is always and
necessarily a subjective objectivity. You cannot find an objective
objectivity. If you pretend that you have one and deny the subjective
aspects of objectivity, then by denying the way the world really is you are
in fact being less “objective” and more prejudiced than those who
recognize the subjective role of understanding things. This is in fact “the
Crisis” that Husserl writes about in his last great work, The Crisis of the
European Sciences, and Transcendental Phenomenology. The “transcendental”
here is a reference to the co-presence of subjectivity and objectivity.
More importantly, our lives are much more complicated than the
purveyors of planful thought and rational choice theory would have it.
The complexities of any ordinary life in situ renders most of the

10
modeling of cognitive scientists foolish. There is time here just to
mention one reason why, and that is the reflexivity of understanding:
understanding is rarely the deductive process that Isaac Newton would
want to talk about. Reflexivity refers to practices that at the same time
describe and constitute a social framework because we have the ability to
find whatever we describe – or rather, our practices of understanding
constitute the framework while they describe it. That is, the describing is
the constituting – the practice of employing an interpretation in our
practical lives is what constitutes the framework, as it describes that same
situation. Basically, our practices of understanding are finding
themselves. The understanding is always describing itself. And I wish to
direct you not only to researchers like ourselves, although is certainly
true for us, I am speaking of people in their ordinary lives.
In the case of the research of Lucy Suchman, I am talking about the
people who use Xerox machines and try to understand the latest version
of instructions on the LCD screen that the machine displays. People
have no choice but to employ whatever understanding they have of
xeroxing by fiddling around with the displays on the touch-screen and
pushing buttons or whatever they think it is going on. No matter what,
they are going to read into the situation what they think they know, and
find a way to get the work done. And in most cases the work will get
done, but there will be a great deal of serendipity to it. Most interestingly,
the way they get the work done on the Xerox machine may never have
been anticipated by the people who designed the machine or those who
designed the instructions. The former Secretary of Defense of United
States might have included what Xerox’s designers didn’t know among
the “unknown unknowns.” Reflexivity is that feature of comprehending
some structure of social action that presupposes, while it provides and
provokes, the conditions that make its own intelligibility sensible.
Phenomenology is very much taken up with the practical tasks of finding
and maintaining the intelligibility of local situations in the course of being
in them, i.e. the in situ.
Most planful accounts miss the reflexivity of quotidian life, which is
the moment-by-moment adjustment and feedback between situation and
reflection, something so spontaneous that it cannot be predicted in
advance. Accordingly, oftentimes planful accounts are unable to locate
the real problems that people have to face, and so we get instruction
manuals that no one is able to understand.

11
 All this was something of an embarrassment to the organizational
theory used by information systems researchers. So talk of “situated”
studies began, in many instances led by ethnomethodological research
projects that located the “troubles” that were to be found in local
occasions, projects that exposed to analysts the work of the reflexivity of
understanding.
Because of reflexivity and other phenomena like it (such as the
indexicality of meanings) textbook versions rarely reflect reality. Let me
give you three illustrations of what I am talking about.
(1) The Oregon state highway department has a planning division
that handles all the sign painting, traffic routing, painting of lanes, the
setting up of signal systems for traffic flows of automobiles, et cetera, in
the State of Oregon (USA). Around 1986, they came to the conclusion
that all good ideas should be “put on the back-burner,” which is
American slang for “No matter how brilliant your theory sounds: don’t
implement it until you actually do a pilot study.” The pilot studies are
instituted for a short period of time (three-nine months is typical) in a
test location before initiating more widespread application that could
create messes all over the state that would then have to cleaned up. The
Oregon state highway department has learned, as part of their practical
work, never to administer a new policy of lane-painting, sign-posting,
signal systems, traffic-routing, etc. without first implementing it on a
trial-only basis. This is for the very good reason that they have had long
experience with the unanticipated consequences of their previous
brilliant planning that created disasters that they were forced to undo.
There are so many of these unanticipated consequences that they
concluded that these consequences are not anticipatable.
(2) The people who write computer programs have similarly learned
not only that they cannot predict where the bugs in the program will
occur, they also cannot predict what clever things they have devised,
until the people who use the beta versions report back to them. The beta
versions offer opportunities to tell the designers what they have
designed. These reports on beta versions even teach them how they
should market the programs and which people and groups to market it
to. They find some bugs but they also learn what it was they really
achieved. There is now a universal reliance on beta versions, and I
interpret that as a frank admission that you can not plan for everything.
(3) The man who worked for the 3-M company who invented post-
its was reading a technical book on an airplane and kept losing the place

12
in the book where the footnotes were. So when he returned to the lab,
he invented post-its. He didn’t have the slightest idea he would change
how every office in the world worked, and would also change the face of
every refrigerator on earth; but he is happy to accept the credit for his
wonder just the same.
These illustrations give you the idea that “situated” studies are
oriented to discovering what the plans did not plan for. And they can
only be discovered by going out into the world and looking. That is, you
cannot recover it by restricting yourself to a review of your best
theorizing. This is what the big deal about “situated” studies is about:
situated studies are oriented to discovering what the plans didn’t plan
for.

2.2 The Problem with Over-conceptualizing, and the Limits of Conoscenza Teoretica

What Heidegger calls “Attunement” (Il Trovarsi) is one of the

fundamental three existential facts of life of what he calls being-in-the-
world – the other two fundamental existential facts of being-in-the-world
are “Understanding” and “Discourse.”
Attunement is the name for what is being more than knowing:
attunement does not know why (127a) it is … “Non si sa. Sono cose che
l’esserci non può sapere” (It 389b/ G 134b). The idea is that we already
are in a situation doing something before we know about it, and the
problem with cognitive scientists as well as with rational choice theorists
in sociology and political science is that they have a model for how
human beings act that examines phenomena that occur only from the
chin up. For them people do have bodies, which is the point of Ciborra’s
“Heart” in the title of his work.
I have spent five years in India, and I have read a good deal of
classical Indian scholarship, not only Tibetan scholarship in Tibetan but
also a lot of Vedanta epistemology. India has a long tradition of
scholarship going back before the time of Christ. They are very rigorous,
almost too technical, but they are oriented to trying to find out about
being, and they try to keep their knowing about being from preventing
their winning reflective access to being. They have been dealing directly
with the very problem I am addressing, and it is quite interesting to
consider their work in this area. I think this is part of the reason why that
many philosophers of the West do not consider what Indians do to be
“philosophy.” For most European scholars, and for many of my

13
colleagues, philosophy properly resides above the chin. When I once
confronted a brilliant Sanskrit-speaking Vedanta scholar in India over a
luncheon table, asking him whether he felt offended that Western
scholars do not consider what he does to be philosophical, he told me,
“They are right. It is not philosophy. We are not interested in
philosophy: it is too mechanical and heartless a pursuit.”
Derrida is following Heidegger’s lead when he keeps seeking ways to
infect his inquiries with what he calls “non-knowledge.” And we social
scientists need to do the same, since there is so much going on in social
organization that is not conceptual. We need to put more effort into
studying non-knowledge, which accounts for a majority of what people
do.
According to Heidegger, in Section 29, “Discourse does not, as such,
mean to be known” (127b/ G 134c). And, “The possibilities of
disclosure to cognition fall far short …” (1217a). He is not saying that
there is not discourse or cognition, but there is so much else going on
that we need to pay close attention to it as well.
At the same time these passages occur in Section 29, Heidegger
sternly warns us against becoming ‘touchy-feely.’ Having taken a stand
against common sense as well as against formal theoretical cognition,
Heidegger still insists on rigorous attention to the just-what of the actual
experience in situ. This is what is meant by phenomenology. Heidegger
writes (130b), “We must not confuse demonstrating the existential-
ontological constitution of cognitive determination in the attunement of
being-in-the-world with the attempt to surrender science to feeling.”
“Non si vorrà scambiare la dimostrazione esistenzial-ontologica che il
determinare conoscitivo si costituisce nel trovarsi nell’essere nel mondo,
col tentativo di consegnare onticamente la scienza nelle mani del
sentimento”.
This rigor, our rigor, consists of paying attention only to “evidence”
(German: Evidenz, Italian Evidenza), which is one of the basic notions of
Husserl’s program of rigorous inquiry. Formal analytic accounts miss this
Evidenz due to the myopia created by their continuous preoccupation
with their theorizing. Evidence grounds understanding: it is what comes
first.
Heidegger also tells us, “Disclosedness does not mean ‘to be
known’”. We cannot reduce our experience to conceptual knowing. One
must already have found oneself in a situation when one commences to
know. We need to study the how of this finding ourselves as well as studying

14
the knowing, and our problem is that we are studying only the knowing.
Heidegger tells us that we are not to minimize the Evidenz of attunement
“by measuring it against the apodictic certainty of the theoretical
cognition” (128b). I do not have time, but I could give you the
wonderful discussion that Emmanuel Levinas has provided us about the
itinerary of ethics and morality in Western philosophy and how they
have lost their connection to evidence and have been turned by
philosophers into a strictly logical and formal analytic enterprise. So I
will just mention it, rather than giving you the details on this occasion.
Merleau-Ponty, who is probably the phenomenologist who is most
faithful to Husserl, expanded these inquiries in his project of non-
dualistic reflection, especially in the amazing book he wrote at the end of
his life, Le Visible et L’Invisible, where he explains his notion of “sur-
reflection.”
We are catching sight of the necessity of another operation besides
conversion to reflection, more fundamental than it, of a sort of “ sur-
réflection [that] would not lose sight of the brute thing and the brute
perception and would not finally efface them, would not cut the organic
bonds … [of] our mute contact with the world when they are not yet
things said.… It must plunge into the world instead of surveying it.”
Heidegger said something similar in Section 29: “Theoretical looking
at the world has always flattened it down to the uniformity of what is
purely objectively present.” (p. 138). The Italian (It 401) is “Lo sguardo
teoretico ha già sempre schermato il mondo sull’uniformità del mero
sottomano…” That is, there is a leveling off that theory does that is the
“bottleneck” of standardization that Jannis Kallinikos has spoken about.
Heidegger is sophisticated enough to recognize that theoretical
cognition brings benefits as well as constraints. Continuing the Italian,
“…un’uniformità dentro la quale, certo, è contenuta la nuova ricchezza
di tutto quanto può essere svelato da un puro determinare.” Or in
English, “… although, of course, a new abundance of what can be
discovered in pure determination lies within that uniformity.” That is, it
is also to be appreciated that there is an acknowledgement of the
brilliance of formal analytic theorizing, a brilliance that we do not want
to surrender. So the incredible situation that we are in as Homo sapiens
(the humans who know) is how do we use formal knowing without letting
it create a prison that we cannot escape. It seems there is more sapience
that we Homo-s need to do. As human beings we are still at our task.

15
 What is this abundance, this richezza di conoscenza teoretica that “pure
determination” brings us? And why is it that formal reason brings such
abundance at the same time that it closes us off to the complexity of real
events? We are not dispensing with formal analytic reason here; we are
only teaching ourselves how to use it more wisely.
Professor Giolo Fele and I are undertaking a study of coffee tasting.
In particular we are examining how assaggiatore di caffè organize the
intelligibility of the formal coffee descriptors they use. The formal terms
they use, like “rich”, “medium bodied,” “acidic,” “rotondo,” fiorito,”
“vellutato,” etc. all permit them to locate tastes and stabilize the
intelligibility of their sensory experience. We are also studying the
benefits and limits the use of quantitative scales for tastes play in the
coffee industry. We are doing a real phenomenology of coffee tasting.
We have already discovered that alongside making it possible for them to
find, purchase and verify shipments of first-rate coffee, these terms
affect the tasting. They close off some tastes, which have a difficult time
being noted, while other tastes receive abundant scrutiny, to the point
that the tongue is taught a great deal about how to find and distinguish
precise flavors.
One of Italy’s principal assaggiatore di caffè speaks of the tasting card in
both positive and pejorative terms: “The card certainly plays an important
role in guiding the judging procedures that apply. However, we must
remember that it is only a tool, and the taster is responsible for
recognizing and evaluating organoleptic characteristics. … The second
[card] is based on thorough research aimed at modernizing the card by
insisting that sensorial analysis is conducted with strict rules.” In Italian:
“Non bisigna mai dimenticare che essa è solo uno strumento da
capire e da utilizzare, la rilevazione delle caratteristiche organolettiche, la
loro elaborazione in giudizi e la successiva espressione è di pertinenza del
degustatore che mai potrà scaricarsi di questa responsibilità … la
seconda [scheda], realizzata sulla scorta di una forte ricerca volta
all’innovazione e in considerazione delle severe regole dell’anilisi
sensoriale.”
The seeming contradiction here is not a flaw in the procedure –
formal analyses always and necessarily provide “elaborazione in giudizi” while
at the same time cannot be made to substitute for the “responsabilità” to
actually taste. As professional thinkers, we are continually trying to
accomplish this very thing.

16
2.3 Befindlichkeit

Evidenz demands that we first taste, and Befindlichkeit, or Attunement,

pays respect to an understanding that is more doing than it is knowing. It
involves rigorous discipline, and just because the discipline is in life and
not in words does not mean that it is not vital. “Attunement” is rendered
in Italian as trovarsi, which is a reflexive verb. Reflexive verbs are really
splendid things, because they already undermine the human conceit that
we are always in control of affairs. Take a verb like annoiarsi, “to become
bored.” The logic of reflexive verbs better represents the actual situation
than the non-reflective English.
In the case of Befindlichkeit, it is a state one finds oneself in without
any deliberate doing. As Heidegger (129) tells us, “[Mood] never comes
from ‘without’ nor from ‘within,’ but rises from being-in-the-world
itself.” Here Heidegger is referring to times when we grow tired of
ourselves, when our being has become manifest to us as a burden, such
as when we are bored.
A closely related term that Heidegger uses is Umsicht, or
“circumspective attention,” “la circumspectio” which is not quite “sapere,”
“conoscenza,” or “conosciuto.” This is a preliminary taking of bearings that
people do to find a context before they settle into it. It implies a broad
sweep, and Heidegger contrasts it with the more invasive, paternalist
strategies of technological manipulation.

2.4 The Limits of Formal Analysis

Much of the foundational experience that Heidegger is describing is

not readily made the subject of formal investigations, at least not without
distorting its basic character beyond recognition. Ciborra (p. 12) writes
of Lucy Suchman’s findings:
“Her empirical study confirms that the organization of situated
action is an emergent property of the moment-by-moment interactions
between actors and their relevant environments. Expert systems are built
on a planning model of human action. ‘The model treats a plan as
something located in the actor’s head.’”
The proponents of “planning models,” which includes artificial
intelligence designers and rational choice theorists but excludes the
Oregon state highway planners, try to resolve difficulties by attempting
to “embed into expert systems more and more sophisticated plans.”

17
 An exclusive reliance on more expert systems loses sight of
Heidegger’s discovery that Dasein finds itself in a situation before
beginning to reflect analytically, that a world already “matters to it” (129b)
(“potere-essere-toccato”, It. 399b) before knowing. And this is where
occurs most of the confusions experienced by the users of Xerox
machines that are documented by Suchman.
Dasein has always found itself “always already” (128a/ già sempre
trovato, It. 391c) in a finding which does not come from a direct seeking
(trovato in un trovare che non scaturisce tanto da un diretto cercare).
Heidegger comes down very severely on this ‘diretto cercare’. But this is
just what most of our research consists of! Even my work in
ethnomethodology is full of ‘diretto cercare,’ which will increase the
likelihood that that I miss the dimension that is most important, at least
according to Heidegger.
The more that formal analytic investigators inspect a situation the less
they will see. Heidegger (127c) observes, “The that of facticity is never to
be found by looking.” The Italian is, “Il fatto-che della fatticità non è
mai reperibile in un vedere intuitivo” (It. 391b). That is because looking -
un diretto cercare - is already looking for something it has in mind; that
is, one already has the frame of the experience built – one’s mind is so
full of what one already knows that one cannot see what one does not
know! Why do we want to do research, if we do not want find out what
we do not yet know? It may be called “positive science,” but it is deluded
just the same. The Tibetans I lived with have a great name for such
delusion: they call it “ignorance” (ma rig ma). For Tibetans, it is not what
you don’t know that makes you ignorant, it is what you do know. That is,
one’s mind is so filled with the certainty of what one does know that
there is no room to learn anything new. Especially, there is no room to
learn what one does not already know.
There is no better model to be found for the imperialism of planful
theorizing than in the social theories of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke,
and John Stuart Mill. They offer an extreme rationalism whereby humans
are born as separate individuals, come together out of their own free will,
and then commence to abstractly negotiate their rights in a social
contract. This is nothing more than a “just-so” story about the origin of
society. People know nothing more than what these rationalist theorists
put into their heads. It may be that people do not know more, but they do
a great deal more than Hobbes, et. al. are able to account for. And this
“more” is fairly well addressed by Heidegger in Section 29.

18
 There is planful action as pre-determined rationalities, and then there
is planful action as the actual course of the situated action, as bricolage, as
difference, as reflexivity, and all the other ways we are learning to think –
or not to think – about these quotidian activities that are the
preoccupation of information system researchers. In his masterpiece
Negative Dialectics, Theodor Adorno speaks of mimesis, a mode of social
being that precedes formal reflection, and he considers it more critical to
understanding than conceptual knowing (and we should not fail to note
here that Adorno was a sworn opponent of Heidegger for all of his
professional life).
Heidegger’s fecund recommendation is instead of commandeering
events, instead of “staring out at something” (129b) with “un guardar
fisso”/”Empfinded oder Anstarren” (It 399a /G137a), we should regard
things in “a circumspectfully heedful way” (Il pro-curante …
circonspettivo). In this way we can listen to the phenomena we are
studying and not exclusively take charge of organizing the intelligibility
of it in advance, like we are running the railways.

2.5 Conclusion

This does not mean we have to leave off of formal analysis, but it
does mean that we must first attune ourselves to what is there. Or if we
are doing social research, we must first witness how others attune
themselves to what is there, and we must find their there (not our “there”).
That is, using Husserl’s language, our professional task is to identify and
describe what are the horizons of their experience, and especially what
are the horizons of their understanding that are at work for the people
we are studying. Only then will our professional advice be pertinent to
the organizational tasks that people are facing in their quotidian life.
An important question for those who wish to work in a
phenomenological way is how do we get access to the non-rational?
This is a thorny question since the tools we have to work with are mostly
rational tools. So how do we adapt them and make them sensitive to the
actual “work” that people are doing in their everyday, practical lives?
There is a vital clue for us in the concluding passage of § 29, in which
Heidegger writes, “The phenomenological interpretation must give to
Dasein itself the possibility of primordial disclosure and let it, so to
speak, interpret itself.” (131b). ‘Letting things be’ is the theme Heidegger
writes a great deal about in his post-World War II writings, but it is only

19
another way of reciting the principal phenomenological slogan from
Being and Time, “To the things themselves!”
Our work of making social inquiries is not irrelevant, because we
have the important descriptive task, Heidegger tells us, of raising “the
phenomenal content of disclosure existentially to a conceptual level” (in
Italian, “elevare al concetto l’importo fenomenale cosí dischiuso,” It.
403). That is, our thinking must be kept appropriate to the events we are
describing, and we must avoid submerging those events beneath our
brilliant plans and theories, but we still need to reflect formally upon
them.
So now have our most serious task – how do we teach each other
speak objectively about these subjective things?

References

Page references to the English text of Being and Time refer to the Joan
Stambaugh translation, Being and Time, SUNY Press, Albany, NY, 1996.
References to the Italian and German texts refer to the bilingual edition,
Martin Heidegger, Essere e Tempo and Sein und Zeit, Mondadori, Milano,
2006.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible, Northwestern
University Press, Evanston, Illinois, pp. 38-9.
Giudo Odello, Espresso Italiano Tasting, Centro Studi Assaggiatori,
Brescia (It.), 2007, p. 46.
Claudio Ciborra, “Getting to the Heart of the Situation: the
Phenomenological Roots of Situatedness,” p. 12; my italics
Suchman, Lucy Plans and Situated Actions - the Problem of Human Machine
Communication, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987.

20
 3.
Afterword

by Gian Marco Campagnolo§, Ylenia Curzi**, Gianluigi Viscusi††

“Understanding is rarely the deductive

process that Isaac Newton would want to
talk about.” (Liberman, Alpis 2009)

In his contribution to this book, Kenneth Liberman furnishes a series

of concepts and hypotheses for the interpretation of concrete social
phenomena. He also puts forward a number of suggestions concerning
the strategy to be adopted by social research which seeks to support
social and organizational practices in the solution of real and concrete
problems.
The aim of this afterword is to be an ‘ideal prolongation’ which
proceeds in three directions in analysing the concepts, hypotheses, and
research strategy put forward by Liberman. More specifically, the first
section shows how the concepts proposed by Liberman make it possible

§ Gian Marco Campagnolo, Dipartimento di Sociologia e Ricerca Sociale,

Facoltà di Sociologia, Università di Trento, Via verdi 26 – 38100, Trento – Italia,
Tel: +390461881372, e-mail: gianmarco.campagnolo@soc.unitn.it. E’ autore del
paragrafo 3.
** Ylenia Curzi, Dipartimento di Economia Aziendale, Facoltà di Economia

“Marco Biagi”, Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Viale J.

Berengario, 51 – 41100 Modena – Italia, e-mail: ylenia.curzi@unimore.it. E’
autore del paragrafo 2.
†† Gianluigi Viscusi, Dipartimento di Informatica Sistemistica e Comunicazione

(DISCo), Università degli Studi di Milano Bicocca, Viale Sarca, 336 – 20126,
Milano – Italia, Tel.+390264487921, e-mail: viscusi@disco.unimib.it. E’ autore
del paragrafo 1.

21
to recast the idea and the use of formal representations – which part of
the literature on information systems considers to be at odds with
situated actions and analyses – in a manner consistent with an approach
to the study and design of information systems based on emotionally
situated understanding.
The second section concentrates on ‘action research’ – namely that
form of empirical research which seeks to combine theory and practice,
research and action for change – and it investigates the consequences of
the orientation of such research to the cognitive strategy proposed by
Liberman.
Finally, the third section highlights the changes which have taken
place in the practices of producing information systems for
organizations. It argues that, although these changes do not challenge the
validity of Liberman’s phenomenological theory in regard to the
interpretation of software production practices, they nevertheless require
its integration when such practices are connoted as contemporary and
post-local social phenomena.

1. From formal representations to subjective objectivity: evidence and reflexivity in

information systems as an area of research

Clarification of the meaning of analysis in situation of an information

system necessarily requires examination of the role of the researcher and
the practices that enable him or her to access the context to be analysed.
In this regard, Kenneth Liberman’s article in this book is already
important because of the question with which it starts: “How can my
participation be useful?”.
However, it is first necessary to provide a brief description of what
is meant by information system. Among the various definitions
proposed in the literature, we regard as sufficiently complete and useful
for our purposes the one proposed by Buckingham, Hirschheim et al.
(1987), for whom an information system is: “[…] a system which
assembles, stores, processes and delivers information relevant to an
organisation (or to a society), in such a way that the information is
accessible and useful to those who wish to use it […] An information
system is a human activity (social) system which may or not involve the
use of computer systems[…]”.. Firstly, this definition highlights what is
meant in general by the term system in the expression ‘information
system’: the set of actors (people, objects, procedures, etc.) that interact

22
to obtain, produce, and distribute information useful to the
participants/users. Secondly, it specifies that an information system does
not necessarily have to make use of a computer (or ICT, as one would
say today). In particular, an information system has the use of
information as its purpose. Following Batini, De Petra et al. (2008), we
consider information to be everything that produces a change in a
person’s stock of knowledge; whilst data can be defined as “recordings
of the description of some characteristic of reality on a support which
guarantees its conservation, and by means of a system of signs which
ensures its comprehensibity and retrievability” (Batini et al., 2008).
Information is therefore such because it is significant and
comprehensible to people or groups of people, whilst data refer to the
support on which those data are recorded and the language with which
they are described (Avison, Fitzgerald, 1995; Batini et al., 2008).
Information and data are therefore closely connected and stand in a
systemic and formal relationship with the other actors involved in an
information system. However, corresponding to this integrated view is a
specialization of research consisting in studies which analyse, on the one
hand, the economic-organizational aspects of information (an
information system as an organizational system), and on the other,
aspects more closely connected with the processing of data and
information by means of technologies (information technology system).
This fragmentation gives rise to a separation which, in Heideggerian
terms, is a forgetfulness which entails consideration of the various
entities encountered in analyses of information systems in terms of
‘simple presence’ or ‘presence at hand’ (Heidegger, 2006). To consider
entities in their simple presence is to privilege a type of formal
knowledge that distracts the researcher from the evidence that the world
is always open to an emotionally situated understanding reducible only at
the cost of a loss. In fact, the attention is often mostly focused on
“formalised information systems” (Avison et al., 1995) through formal
approaches based on rules and clear structures rather than on logical-
mathematical models. In this regard, the study by D’Atri, Spagnoletti et
al. (2009), which analyses the MIT Beer Game as specifically adapted to
training in supply chain management, well emphasises the value added
and the situational limitations of formal approaches like simulations:
“The MIT Beer Game and our versions experienced similar limitations:
firstly, the difficulty of providing a realistic vision of the supply chain
management. Secondly: it is true that the game structure (where

23
middlemen are placed on parallel lines) allows the retailer to choose
suppliers but despite this, it cannot be compared to the actual
complexities of a supply chain (D’Atri et al., 2009).
The question of the formalization of thought (Liberman, 2007), or
of formal representations, is therefore the background which makes
Liberman’s theoretical contribution useful to the research community on
information systems, also and especially because of the epistemological
status of information systems as a discipline. In fact, this area of inquiry
seems to figure among the human sciences considered in the sense
envisaged by Michel Foucault in The Order of Things (Foucault, 1966).
From this perspective, the human sciences arise from the interstices
among (i) mathematics and physics, (ii) the sciences that seek to define
human beings in the terms of their lives (biology), their language
(linguistics), their work (economics), and (iii) philosophy. Our purpose
here is not to conduct detailed analysis of the perspective introduced by
Foucault (1966), but rather to highlight the borderline nature of the
human sciences, which make use of concepts and methods from the
above-mentioned disciplines but do not identify with any of them: “at
one level or another, [they use] mathematical formalization; they proceed
in accordance with models or concepts borrowed from biology,
economics, and the sciences of language” (Foucault, 1966 – translation
of the author). What is distinctive of the human sciences, finally, is that
they furnish representations of each of the dimensions proper to their
adjoining disciplines (Foucault, 1966). Given these premises, the role of
the models and formalizations – that is, of representations – allocate a
particular place among the human sciences to information systems,
where the concept of representation solicits their analysis and design.
Important in this regard are the findings of Kern, Zirpins et al. (2009),
who show the challenges that architectures oriented to services and
technologies raise for the rationalization of work and the definition of
appropriate quality standards, with potential consequences for the
concept itself of work as it arose in industrial society, but also as it is
today in the services society. Such systems, in fact, alter the very notion
of work routine in terms of schedules, skills, and contracts between
employees and employers, and they redefine business models and
professionalism. In this context, it is necessary to understand the
consequences produced by the forgetfulness of emotionally situated
work, namely the fact that abstract, formalized and standardized tasks
are considered tout court the work. Whereas, they are generated from

24
living and emotionally denoted work activities, not easily de-
composables. Indeed, these service oriented and collective work systems
overcome the lack of scalability of the situated work by detaching
representations of activities that can be (potentially) infinitely
disaggregated and recomposed.
The role of formal representations has been at the centre of
animated debate in the area of information systems (Ciborra, 2002;
Suchman, 1987; Winograd, Flores, 1987). The main objective of the
debate has been to show the limitations of a certain vision of rationality,
often denoted with the generic heading of positivism, whose naiveté, as
rightly pointed out by Liberman in a philosophical context broader than
that of information systems, resides in the fact that it investigates “the
truth of a world that is presumed to exist just in the way it is being
interrogated” (Liberman, 2007). Experience is somehow obscured and
forgotten as the source of the theory, which changes from being
explanatory to foundational and cogent at the ontological level: that is, as
already given and as the truth of experience. Heidegger’s thought has
provided important theoretical support in this regard (Winograd et al.,
1987) by showing how enunciations have been considered the
repositories of truth in the history of metaphysics, but neglecting that
truth originates in the interpreting and understanding being-in-world.
That which in very general terms is to be emphasised here is the
relationship between enunciation (qua formalization) and theoretical
knowledge. To simplify, Heidegger considers theoretical knowledge to
be a descriptive attitude to the truth of entities, without their
consideration within the set of references that characterize their usability.
In theoretical knowledge the world emerges as being-at-hand
(Vorhandenheit), and the truth of entities is communicated through
enunciations (Aussage). In this regard, Liberman quotes the following
passage from Being and Time (in the Italian translation: “[...]lo sguardo
teoretico ha già sempre schermato il mondo sull’uniformità del mero
sottomano[...]” (Liberman, 2007). In a certain sense, therefore,
theoretical knowledge isolates understanding from the other modalities
of the Dasein (Heidegger, 2006), particularly by separating it from the
affective situation which indicates that being exceeds knowing. Although
criticisms of the rationalist perspective typical of positivist approaches to
research do not add a great deal to what has already been said in the
debate engendered by publication of the book by Winograd et al. (1987),
Liberman’s reference in his article to a text by Ciborra (Ciborra, 2006) is

25
a step forward in identifying another ‘naiveté’ little emphasised by
criticism. Ciborra shows that also approaches to the situated analysis of
information systems fail to grasp the ‘core’ of practices, and thus reduce
the extent and originality of the emotional situation (Ciborra, 2006).
Moreover, the relative novelty that Liberman seeks to emphasise is, in a
certain sense, the fact that Heidegger shows how to overcome the
opposition between the objectifying views distant from the evidence
(Evidenz) which should be at the basis of research – i.e. attention to
experience in situ – regardless of every partial representation or
theoretical model applicable to it considered in terms of realism.
Heidegger, in fact, warns against confusing the existential-ontological
demonstration of theoretical-cognitive knowledge based on the
emotional situation with the subjugation of science to feeling. This
would be to replace one ‘naiveté’ with another. It is instead necessary to
acknowledge the partiality of the theoretical knowledge that always arises
from interpretation of an understanding emotionally situated in the
world. Rigorous research must therefore relate the entity given at hand –
the object of theoretical knowledge – to the interpretation on which it is
founded. In this regard, Viscusi (2009) seeks to show the value of a
methodology able to maintain the correct critical distance between
formalization and the context of intervention in the planning of
eGovernment initiatives. It is necessary to recognize, as Liberman
shows, that there is no objectivity which is not accompanied by
interpretation; there is always a ‘subjective objectivity’. Here ‘subjective’
does not refer to cognitive activity, but rather to local situatedness in a
context of emotionally characterized practical referrals. Consequently,
formal representations should not be eliminated and replaced with partial
and objectifying perspectives which define what situated experience is a
priori. Rather, in research on information systems and their design, it is
necessary to render data and formal representations into “living
classifications” (Bowker, Star, 1999). To be stressed here is the
importance of the reflexivity of understanding whereby, as Liberman
puts it, “the understanding is always describing itself”.
The theme of the reflexivity of understanding and of the models
adopted in organizations or in social research has been addressed by
various authors (Bourdieu, 1992; Giddens, 1984; Orlikowski, 1992;
Rabinow, 2008). To be emphasised is that recognizing the reflexivity of
understanding is an important prerequisite if formal representations are
to be used to gain access to the practices distinctive of a particular

26
context of action. Relevant here is the concept of ‘boundary object’
(Star, Griesemer, 1989), which refers to those particular objects that
make it possible to develop, maintain and integrate knowledge deriving
from different ‘social worlds’.1 ‘Boundary objects’ may be material
objects, but they may also be abstract ones such as organizational forms,
procedures, maps, categories and schemes of classification. Given their
capacity to assume different meanings in heterogeneous social worlds,
whilst maintaining a common and translatable meaning, ‘boundary
objects’ are considered to be interfaces for the production of knowledge,
and they are often constructed and naturalized as ecological systems
(Bowker et al., 1999). ‘Boundary objects’ are therefore in the first
instance physical boundaries – that is, artifacts in which are inscribed
what we have identified as ‘conceptual boundaries’ or ‘formal
representations’ able to guide actors. Such conceptual ‘boundaries’ may
perform the twofold role that Schmidt (1997) has identified for formal
constructs in cooperative work. On the one hand, according to a
conception that gives a ‘weak’ role to such constructs in real situations of
interaction (in that they are ‘external to those situations and not
reducible to them), they are maps furnishing an encoded representation
of the domain and the activities performed within it. On the other,
according to a normative conception of formal constructs, they are
scripts furnishing on the one hand a limited selection of valid, permitted
and safe actions, and on the other – by difference and exclusion – a
series of actions which are not allowed or inadvisable. In both cases,
formal constructs understood as either maps or scripts are resources and
constraints – affordances (Gibson, 1979) – in physical and social
circumstances (Schmidt, 1997).
Braccini (2009) provides an example of how a system can support
the sharing of knowledge in the way that archaeologists manage and
conserve the artistic and cultural heritage. In this case, an integrated
information system acts as a ‘boundary object’ for its various users
(archaeologists, archivists, renovators, etc.) because it enables them to
create personalized views, and to add new data by structuring them
according to the contextual requirements of technologies like RFID. The
representation therefore supports the traceability of the archaeological
find by basing it on the experiential context, never reifying it into a
specific and unalterable formalization.

1 On this see Hughes (1970).

27
 In the case of information systems, therefore, we have a twofold
instance of translation and integration: on the one hand, there are
different communities of users; on the other, the need to formalize
discursive practices so that they can be processed in an information
technology system.2 Classification systems thus make it possible to
model shared domains, but they also assume the features of technologies
of the self (Foucault, 1975) in that they lose the flexibility of ‘boundary
objects’, becoming standards with political and social implications, and
losing the traces of their construction through discursive and non-
discursive practices deriving from heterogeneous communities. Hence,
when a formal representation loses the evidence of its reflexivity and
presents itself as the only possible truth; indeed, a truth which concerns
what it has to explain, but which, from this perspective, must already
presuppose it.
Liberman accordingly shows us how phenomenology can favour the
use of formal representations in a truly situated approach to the study
and design of information systems by clarifying the role of the reflexivity
of understanding and the significance of the evidence of an emotionally
interpreting subjective objectivity.

2. Research and intervention upon social and organizational systems: what

strategy of study?

‘Action research’ is a form of empirical research in which there are

indissoluble linkages between theory and practice, research and
intervention, knowledge and change (Albano, forthcoming). Action
research, in fact, consists in analysis and reflection conducted in (social
and/or organizational) practice. Its purpose is to produce knowledge
useful for the solution of a concrete problem, and it is instrumentally
oriented to change (Albano, forthcoming; Bonzanini, De Masi, 1984;
Gilli, 1971; Lewin, 1946).

2 According to Carlo Sini, every script brings out a threshold of the world,
which it depicts. For mathematical script, in which we can discern the origin of
informatic script, this threshold of representation is the scheme “by which the
world is schematized (its specific miniaturization)” (Sini, 1997). The danger lies
in likening the depictable (the world) with the depicted (in this case the scheme)
so that the origin of the meaning depicted may be forgotten.

28
 This brief outline serves to frame the direction of analysis
suggested by Hermann (2009), Wagner et al. (2009), Bratteteig (2009)
and Liberman (2009) in papers given at Alpis 2009, the first ones in the
session devoted to action research, the last in the opening session.
The proposal by Hermann (2009), Wagner et al. (2009) and, at least
implicitly, by Bratteteig (2009) can be summarized as follows. If action
research is to produce knowledge useful for the solution of a concrete
problem, it should be conducted in a manner which makes it possible to
bring out and consider the multiple, different, and often conflicting
points of view of the agents in a social/organizational system with
respect to the possible desired directions of change, the ways to achieve
it, and the specific characteristics of the situation studied. As evidenced
by Wagner et al. (2009) in particular, this yields a shared understanding
of the problem and a shared notion of the solution.
Liberman’s (2009) paper does not specifically deal with action
research. However, it puts forward a suggestion that we may set in
relation to those made by the other contributions cited,, namely the
recommended orientation to a strategy of study such as expressed by the
following concepts drawn from the phenomenology of Heidegger and
Husserl: Befindlichkeit, Evidenz, Umsicht. According to this strategy,
the task of the researcher is to discover and describe the plurality of
horizons of experience and interpretation (points of view, we might say)
of the various agents whom s/he studies in regard to the situation
studied. To this end, the researcher should first ‘attune’ him/herself to
what is happening in the situation or, better, observe how the agents
‘attune’ themselves to what is happening in the situation in which they
are acting. Only subsequently can the researcher organize, by means of
concepts and theories, the intelligibility of what s/he has observed.
Liberman (2009) stresses that precisely because of these features, this
strategy allows the researcher to yield suggestions pertinent to the real
problems that people face in their quotidian work of organizing the local
situation.
These observations, jointly considered, prompt reflection on the
implications of an orientation of action research to the strategy
underlying phenomenological research as briefly described above. Our
hypothesis is that if the implications of the orientation of action research
to the strategy in question are to be made intelligible, it is first necessary
to render intelligible the presupposition of that same strategy. To this
end, given the perspective adopted, we shall concentrate on the logical

29
structure of the latter. In particular, we shall refer to the work of von
Wright (1971, chapters 1 and 3).
von Wright maintains that the cognitive strategy underlying
phenomenological research consists in understanding the meaning of
human and social action on the basis of the sense intended by the actors,
that is, on the basis of their desires, motives, acts of will, and their
intentions, reasons, and beliefs concerning means/ends relationships.
von Wright highlights that understanding can be expressed by a
practical syllogism consisting of a major premise stating that an agent has
the intention to bring about p; a minor premise which describes the
agent’s cognitive attitudes, his/her beliefs about the means required to
bring about p (“A believes that s/he cannot bring about p unless s/he
does a”); and a conclusion which describes a behaviour consistent with
the premises (“A sets him/herself to do a” or “A does a”).
Finally, von Wright argues in logical terms that it is not possible to
consider the practical syllogism – and therefore understanding of the
meaning of action on the basis of the sense given to it by the actors – as
a form of nomological-deductive explanation (Hempel, 1966). He
specifies that this latter presupposes that it is possible to explain and
predict an individual fact by subsuming it under a general law which
expresses a relationship of sufficient conditionship between cause and
effect (von Wright, 1971, pp. 38, 58), and of which the production of the
fact is an instance.
Hence, insofar as the practical syllogism does not express a
nomological-deductive explanation of the action, the connection
between its premises and its conclusion is not a relationship of sufficient
conditionship which can be used to predict the occurrence of behaviour
on the basis of the agent’s known intentions and cognitive attitudes. In
this regard, von Wright specifies that the necessity of the practical
syllogism is conceived ex post actu, and that understanding of the
meaning of the action on the basis of the sense intended by the actor is a
construction from a given conclusion of premises consistent with it and
corresponding to it. In other words, it is an a posteriori justification of a
behaviour observed to occur; a re-construction made after or during the
action of the intentions and reasons, of the motives, desires, acts of will
and cognitive attitudes underlying the behaviour of actors.
What has been highlighted by von Wright clarifies in logical terms
the presupposition on which is based understanding of the meaning of
human and social action on the basis of the sense intended by the actors,

30
that is the denial of every possibility of prediction and the consequent
precedence given to the observation of what happens in the individual
concrete case as against the organization of its intelligibility.
Moreover, the reference to von Wright’s contribution makes it
possible to highlight the implications of the orientation of action
research to the strategy in question on the logical level. To this end, we
now separately consider the phase of reflection conducted in (social
and/or organizational) practice on a problem requiring a solution and
the phase of action for change.
During the reflection phase, orientation to a strategy that assumes
the impossibility of predicting the occurrence of a behaviour on the basis
of the agents’ intentions and cognitive attitudes makes it possible to take
account of the fact- emphasised by Liberman (2009)- that the course of
action is characterized by phenomena such as reflexivity, bricolage, and
unanticipated consequences. Moreover, since this strategy assumes the
impossibility of prediction, it gives precedence to the observation of
what is happening in an individual concrete case as against its
interpretation through concepts and theories, thereby expressing itself in
the a posteriori reconstruction of the meaning of what has happened.
Therefore, the orientation to this strategy offers the opportunity-
highlighted by Liberman (2009)- to discover and learn what is not
already known and does not conform with a previously constructed
conceptual scheme. .. Finally, it allows account to be taken of those
unique elements of the course of action which escape the idea of
“conformity with a genus” and therefore the subsumption under a
general law. Put otherwise: because of the presupposition of the strategy
in question, which implies that it expresses itself in the a posteriori
reconstruction of the meaning of action in a particular concrete case, the
orientation of action research to this strategy ,offers, in the reflection
phase, the opportunity to take account of aspects of the phenomena
observed which are not grasped when action research is oriented to the
positivist strategy based on the opposite presupposition.
The presupposition that offers these possibilities during the
reflection phase precludes others in the phase of action for change. In
fact, if change (the solution of a concrete problem) is considered to be
the aim pursued by the actors, the orientation to the strategy underlying
phenomenological research entails that the change, and beliefs
concerning the means to achieve it, are reconstructed ex post from
observation of the behaviour of the agents and as premises consistent

31
with that behaviour and corresponding to it. If instead change (the
solution of a concrete problem) is the phenomenon observed, the
orientation to the strategy in question entails that the change is justified a
posteriori or during the observation through the re-construction of
agents’ intentions, and beliefs about the means to fulfil them, that are
consistent with and corresponding to the change observed.
These considerations are not intended to suggest that, in action
research oriented to the strategy underlying phenomenological research,
the activity of reflection cannot be ‘connected’ with a change. In fact, as
it has been pointed out (Maggi, 2003, chapter III.2; Albano,
forthcoming), by virtue of the interpretation of what has happened,
people can acquire greater awareness of the system of action and power
relations in which they are embedded. They can also develop new
intentions, desires, motives, reasons for action, and new beliefs
concerning the means required to realize them; and this may also be
followed by a change in the action system made by the actors in order to
serve their own interests.
These considerations highlight that, due to the presupposition on
which is based understanding of the meaning of action on the basis of
the sense given to it by the actors, action research consistently oriented
to this strategy is unable , to offer any prior indications concerning the
means required to achieve change (or to solve a concrete problem) when
this is regarded as the purpose or the intention of the actors. Nor is it
able to offer prior indications concerning the change (or the solution of
a concrete problem) when this is regarded as the means to realize other
intentions of the agents. We believe that this aspect should be
emphasised, because Liberman’s (2009) article might be taken to suggest
the reverse, especially in the passage arguing that only when use is made
of the strategy underlying phenomenological research can the researcher
offer suggestions pertinent to the real problems that agents have to face
in the situation studied.
In this section we have discussed the implications of an orientation
of action research to the strategy underlying phenomenological research,
starting with the elucidation of that strategy’s presupposition. To this
end, we have concentrated on its logical structure, drawing on von
Wright (1971). Although this is not the only possible approach, we
nevertheless believe that it helps give full intelligibility to both the
possibilities offered by an orientation of action research to the strategy in
question and those precluded. In other words, we believe that this makes

32
it possible to clarify, in relation to action research, the consequences of
exploiting the possibilities offered by this strategy in terms of the loss of
other possibilities. In regard to this aspect, the reflection conducted and
its implications are primarily addressed to the operators that have to, or
desire to, choose an approach to action research. In developing them, we
have considered the approach to action research as a form of action, and
we have sought to adopt the perspective indicated by Weber (1904),
who, in conclusion, we would like to quote briefly: “All thoughtful
reflection on the ultimate elements of meaningful human action is
primarily tied to the categories of ‘end’ and ‘means’. We want something
concretely either ‘for its own sake’ or as a means for achieving
something else which is more highly desired. The suitability of the means
to given ends is the prime question accessible to scientific consideration
[...] Taking into account the bounds of our knowledge, if the conditions
for attaining a given end seem to be present, we can determine the
consequences of the application of the requisite means besides the
attainment of the intended end [...]. In this way we offer to the actor the
possibility [...] to answer the question: what does attainment of the
desired end ‘cost’ in the context of loss […] of other values? [...] No
person behaving reflectively and responsibility can avoid this balancing
of the ends of an action against its consequences; and one of the most
important functions of the technical criticism considered so far is to
provide for this. Turning an assessment of this kind into a decision is
certainly not the business of science, but of the desiring person [...]. In
the making of such a decision we can further offer knowledge of the
significance of what is wished for. We can elucidate the desired ends
between which he chooses according to context and significance, first of
all by indicating and developing in a logically consistent manner the
‘ideas’ that do, or can, underlie the concrete end [...] considered in their
content and in their ultimate axioms, as well as in the consequences that
logically and practically they derive from their realization. [...] Whether
these ultimate standards [axioms] should be acknowledged by the […]
subject is his own affair, a question of his desire and conscience, and his
personal view of the world”.

33
 3. The historical evolution and the geographical expansion of the practice of
producing information systems for organizations

This section argues that when a practice extends across space and
time, it requires the renewal of the analytical categories necessary for its
understanding. This thesis will be illustrated by surveying the papers
given at the Alpis session on social studies concerning information
systems. It will use the concepts proposed by Kenneth Liberman’s
phenomenological treatment of situated studies, starting from the
thought of Martin Heidegger. Enumeration will be made of the concepts
proposed by the phenomenological approach as derived from situated
studies (Suchman, 1987), with discussion of its applicability in the
current context of practices for the design of information systems, a
domain in which situated studies have been successfully applied. It will
be asked whether the extension in space and time of design practices, the
fact that they result from intricate international dynamics distributed
among a multiplicity of actors – with the consequent change in design
methods due to the greater processing capacity and memory of
computers, as well as to their ubiquity – make a difference with respect
to the categories used by phenomenology and the situated studies
approach to understand the limitations of the design of information
systems as “formal analysis” (Liberman 2009: p.11). Then proposed will
be conceptual and methodological categories that emerged from the
Alpis session on social studies of technological markets as better suited
to the understanding of software production as a contemporary and
post-local social phenomenon.
The solutions to the problem of the unpredictability of the events
perceived by the designers of Xerox photocopiers in the 1880s, of which
Liberman speaks in his ALPIS paper with reference to Suchman (1987),
have evolved over time. The current solution seems no longer to be that
of incorporating “more and more sophisticated plans” (Ciborra, 2006;
see Suchman 1987) into expert systems. In 2009 the design of
information systems appears to be the business of large multinational
companies which have evolved their technological products over
decades of experience in relationships with users. The designer is no
longer a single individual relying on formal calculations to anticipate the
possible uses of a system. Perhaps because design firms are aware of the
reflexivity of our understanding, and because of their phenomenological
awareness that the “describing is the constituting” (Liberman, p.4), they

34
realize that the more formal analysis is used to investigate a situation, the
more that situation changes – and they seem to apply this principle
knowingly and competently. In this regard, the business information
systems of the multinational companies dealing in management software
increasingly take the form of standard pre-packaged products. Such
products embody the ways in which tasks are structured by the ‘average’
of clients in each of the production sectors for which the supplier offers
products. The pre-packaged product does not claim to match local uses.
Rather, it offers guarantees concerning a series of other advantages.
Because it is a standard product, unless major changes are made to it by
the user, it can be reliably maintained on-line by the manufacturing firm.
Moreover, the supplier establishes partnerships with a series of local
subcontractors, to which it cedes the flourishing market of system
‘personalizations’ and management of the problem of the
unpredictability of events in regard to the personalized versions of the
system.
During the Alpis session of social studies on technological markets,
various papers proposed concepts for a social analysis able to keep
abreast with the evolution of technological markets and the consequent
evolution of what is meant by developing an information system for
organization. In this regard, the paper by Neil Pollock (Pollock, 2009)
considered how consultants classify and organize emerging technology
markets. It showed that when a specific type of consultant – the
industrial analyst – discuss the emergence of a new technology they also
define the state of the technological industry and its future development.
Pollock’s paper focused on the process of categorization applied by
industrial analysts and on the variety of terms used to differentiate
among very similar artifacts. Instead of perceiving nomination solely as a
cognitive limitation – a form which in referring to Heidegger can be
called ‘concealment’ in the organization of the intelligibility of the artifact
software in its organizational use – Pollock shows how these partial
categories are deliberately used by industrial analysts both to order (and
to represent) the technological market, to give it form and to generate
effects on other actors, such as software companies and users. The
socio-political procedure of the intermediaries in what Pollock calls the
“technological field” (Pollock, 2009: p. ...) cannot be related to the
formal and analytical accounts of rational choice theorists in sociology
and political science, and it cannot be described solely in terms of the
cognitive performance of a single individual. Just as the Oregon State

35
Highway Department of which Liberman speaks was aware of the
limitedness of its planning model, and consequently implemented all
ideas concerning road signage systems on a trial basis before their
definitive use (“put on the back-burner”, Liberman, p.5), so the
multinational companies that today produce the information systems
used throughout the world by organizations and their members (IBM,
SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, etc.) proceed according to a cognitive paradigm
more distant than can be imagined from Isaac Newton’s deductive
process.
The operations of multinational companies in the production of
software stand in relation to the deductive process and the planning
model of the expert systems designer in the same way as the ‘big
sciences’ stand in relation to the ‘small sciences’ described by Harris
(1998). By comparing the mappings of all the constituent parts of the
scientific knowledge projects at the beginnings of modern science with
those of the age of geographical discoveries, Harris shows how the
development and initial use of the astronomical telescope and pneumatic
equipment were ‘small enterprises’, because their construction required
the labour of a few people for a brief period of time in a restricted
geographical context. By contrast, in the mapping of South America, the
assembly of a cabinet of curiosities and the construction of a taxonomy
of quadrupeds were ‘big enterprises’ because they required long-term
labour by a large number of people distributed across a broad
geographical area (James Harris, 1998: pp. 275-6). We propose here that
the status of big science should also be assigned to software production.
On investigating what principle of jurisdiction governs the actors
working within the ‘big enterprises’ of software production in
technology markets, Antonios Kaniadikis introduces the notion of the
“Agora of techno-organizational change” in his Alpis paper. This
expression refers to the emergence and expansion in the global context
of a market for the resources necessary to undertake technological
change in businesses. These resources comprise technologies like
information systems and software packages, technical and managerial
expertise, methodologies for the management of change, project
management skills, and others besides. The Agora of techno-
organizational change is populated by heterogeneous actors (suppliers,
users, intermediaries, consultants, analysts, states, professional
associations, and so on) actors with conflicting (or otherwise) interests
and diverse points of view.

36
 The uncertainty and confusion of industrial practices reflect a
similar situation in academic research. The interdisciplinary study of
technological and organizational innovation appears fragmented and
unable to grasp analytically and explore in integrated manner the
emergence and taking shape of a global market for techno-organizational
change. In particular, although a recent focus by situated studies on the
phase of technological implementation – which has come about in
opposition to technocratic analysis – is informative, it has created an
analytical gap which leaves the broader context of socio-economic
relationships unexplored. Campagnolo, in his paper given at Alpis
(Campagnolo, 2009), talked in this regard about how the methods of
social researchers (and in particular the research design with which they
conduct fieldwork) reflexively gives shape to the analysis. Designing
research on a technology’s implementation which concentrates
exclusively on the context of the client organization, and only during the
period in which the researcher has access to the field, will necessarily
emphasise the local aspects of work practices in the user organization as
being different from those supported by the technological supply. It is a
different matter how the supplier organization can respond to the variety
of requests made by users notwithstanding the idiosyncrasy of each
organizational context, so that interest shifts from the importing of
organizational solutions to an interest in their exporting. Social analysis
of this context requires methodologies which consider a broader space-
time horizon. Quoting George Marcus, Campagnolo suggests multi-sited
ethnography as one of these possible methodologies with which to
construct the field: “Words, objects and identities take their meaning
through their circulation in diffused time-space [...]. Tracing cultural
formations becomes a mobile activity” (Marcus 1995, p.96).
To resume the flow of Kenneth Liberman’s reflections, we must
now return whence we began: the theme of formal analysis and the fact
that, as Liberman says, “understanding is rarely the deductive process
that Isaac Newton would want to talk about”. To what type of practice
today corresponds what Heidegger called “direct seeking”? It is true that
the Dasein (the being-there) is always present in a situation before
analytical reflection begins, and that the Dasein is found “in a finding
which arises not so much from a direct seeking”. But what can we say
about the fact that the direct seeking has evolved from the expert
systems of the 1980s into the database analytics of the present day. And
how we can quantify that ‘so much’ of the finding that arises from the

37
direct seeking? In short, can we postulate that the Dasein is to some
extent reflexively influenced by the technologies of direct seeking?
According to Jannis Kallinikos the answer is ‘yes’. Formal analysis (or
the database analytics of which Kallinikos spoke in his paper at Alpis
2009) appears limited only if it is distinguished from the non-rational,
only if it is attributed a status of objectivity separate from the subjective
status given to other epistemological positions. Kallinikos instead
attributes to formal analysis the “tyranny of perpetual remembering”
which overwhelms the evolutionary role and significance that forgetting
has had in personal and cultural development. Moreover, a mass of data
accumulated by the storage and processing power of computer
memories is always addressed to the past. It thus favours the
maintenance of what has happened rather than what might have
happened: all the near misses, dreams and imaginings that are not
captured in databases but which nevertheless influence our perceptions
just as much as reality does. In this regard, Maniatopoulos (2009),
drawing on the social theory of Castoriadis (1987), addresses the
relationships among the rational, perceptual and imaginary components
of signification in the context of technology choice. Maniatopoulos
proposes Castoriadis’s theory as a resource for the analysis of the
complex nature of technology choice and its relationship with
institutional desires, fantasies and imaginary practices. The acquisition of
certain technologies by organizations can simultaneously furnish
evidence of membership in certain social groups, indicate significant
relationships, and incorporate the imaginary corresponding to the
professionalism with which that organization wants to represent itself.
In this brief exploration of social studies on technology markets
viewed through phenomenological lens we have sought to enumerate
some critical aspects of the phenomenological research tools employed
to understand contemporary practices of information systems
development. Firstly, by referring to a comparison between two
techniques (that of planning model and that of database analytics) we
have asked the following question: what is the impact exerted by
technological change on the epistemological categories used by
Heiddegerian phenomenology to describe formal analysis and
cybernetics? We have answered this question by describing certain
aspects of technology design, not as individual practice but as embedded
in an evolving global market. Then, with reference to Pollock’s paper, we
have read the practices of industrial analysts by proposing Heidegger’s

38
concept of concealment as intentional and relational rather than as
individual/ontological. We have subsequently described software
development and its markets as ‘big science’, arguing, with reference to
Kaniadakis’s notion of the “agora of the techno-organizational change”,
that a change of scale in a practice must necessarily be followed by the
devising of new analytical categories for its understanding. Thirdly, we
have addressed a problem of method: how can practices distributed in
space and time be studied without the research design reflexively
influencing the results obtained? We have proposed multi-sited
ethnography as a practice that interprets this movement of
methodological criticism ?. Finally, with reference to a comparison
between the planning model of expert systems which Suchman discusses
and the database analytics described by Ayres, we have suggested that
formal analysis restricts the possibility of understanding reality by acting
performatively on it, extending the dimension of perpetual memory to
the detriment of identifying the role of imaginary signification in
definition of the organizational identity that also takes shape through
technology choice.

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